Is AI part of your business strategy? Well, if it’s not, it probably should be. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, and Arun Jagannathan, two-time entrepreneur, enthusiastically agree on that. In this episode you’ll gain strategic insights and practical tools from an AI visionary and hear how one intrepid entrepreneur is pushing himself and his company to embrace AI.

Arun Jagannathan is the founder of not one, but two, startups in India. CrackVerbal helps students prepare for exams and make smarter career decisions, and Yzerly enhances corporate communication through innovative training programs. Jagannathan says, “Many employees today are asking: What is our AI strategy? Because nobody is in a bubble. Everybody is hearing this, right? And they know that if we are on a growth path, on a growth trajectory, then AI has to be a part of the strategy.” So, he’s experimenting and adapting across different facets of his business to reap the full benefits of AI.

Ethan Mollick is here to help. He’s a professor, blogger, and best-selling author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, a practical guide for thinking and working with AI. Mollick’s practical experience, deep research, and endless curiosity enable him to guide entrepreneurs on the AI journey so they can tackle it more practically, systematically, and creatively. He begins by asking entrepreneurs four questions in the face of AI: What special thing have you done that is no longer important? What impossible thing can you now do? What can you move down market or democratize? What can you have upmarket or personalized?

“I think if you think about those sets of ideas, you end up in pretty good shape,” Mollick says. He also places great importance on keeping “humans in the loop” and so does Jagannathan. “What AI does is, it makes good very easy, but great is still very hard,” Jagannathan explains.

Hear how Jagannathan answers those four important questions and learn how to ask them of yourself and your company while navigating the challenges that companies and employees face when integrating AI into their businesses.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on going global – a guide for expanding your business beyond borders. Steve Ciesinski, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer in entrepreneurship, walks you through the pitfalls and possibilities of making the move from local venture to global enterprise.

It goes without saying that having an outstanding product or service is key to business success. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when you want to expand your business – regionally and/or globally. According to Steve Ciesinski, scaling introduces additional challenges, including cultural and regulatory differences, economic and political risks, language barriers, supply chain struggles, and more. However, he believes that entrepreneurs who plan carefully and execute flawlessly can create value on a global scale.

Steve Ciesinski has had plenty of experience advising entrepreneurs on global expansion. He’s a Stanford GSB lecturer in entrepreneurship, past president of SRI International and other Silicon Valley firms, and an investor and board member of growth-oriented tech companies and mission-based organizations.

Three Key Takeaways for Going Global:

Your product market fit might not fit in a different market

“Things are very, very different and very subtle sometimes as you get into a marketplace. You have to be very agile. You have to be super flexible.”

Find the right person for the right place

“If you're going to go to another country and you're not going to be there personally as the founder, then who's going to run that country for you? You have to have somebody there that you completely, 100 percent trust, because things will go wrong.”

Regulatory compliance is a tricky business

You have to be very, very careful. You have a choice. When you have a new thing, do you try to cooperate with the government? How long will that government be in place? You have some choices early on as to what you do in whatever country. You may be successful in Nigeria, but in Kenya, or if you were trying to go across the pond to Mexico, you may not be so successful with your product.”

Listen to Steve Ciesinski’s advice on what to keep in mind when entering new markets so you can scale with less friction and more success.

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Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on AI — a practical guide for experimenting and engaging with artificial intelligence. Ethan Mollick, Wharton School associate professor of innovation and entrepreneurship, AI visionary, and best-selling author walks us through the hype, fears, and potential of this transformative and complex technology.

AI is reshaping business, society, and education with unprecedented speed. Ethan Mollick urges business leaders and educators to get in there and figure it out for themselves — to experiment and discover, rather than sitting on the sidelines waiting for AI to come to them. His latest book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, is a practical guide for thinking and working with AI so you can determine how and where it can be utilized most effectively.

Mollick believes that AI can help entrepreneurs at every stage of business, including coming up with the very idea for the business itself. “AI out-innovates people in most cases,” he says, “so you should probably be using it to help you generate ideas.” In fact, he encourages us to think about AI as a co-founder to bounce ideas off. Mollick also acknowledges that people need to push through those initial couple hours of resistance when exploring AI. “There's a lot of reasons people stop using AI. It's weird. It freaks them out. It gives them bad answers — initially. You need to push through, like there is a point of expertise with this, where you start to get what it does and what it doesn't. Ten hours is my loose rule of thumb for how much time you have to spend using these systems to kind of get it.”

Mollick’s Four Essential Rules for Integrating AI into Work and Life

1. Always invite AI to the table.

“You don't know what AI is good for or bad for inside your job or your industry. Nobody knows. The only way to figure it out is disciplined experimentation. Just use it a lot for everything you possibly can.”

2. Be the human in the loop.

“The AI is better than a lot of people in a lot of jobs, but not at their whole job, right? And so, whatever you’re best at, you're almost certainly better than the AI is.”

3. Treat AI like a human

AI models are “trained on human language and they're refined on human language. And it just turns out that they respond best to human speech. Telling it and giving tasks like a person often gets you where you need to go.”

… (but tell it what kind of human to be)

“AI models often need context to operate. Otherwise they produce very generic results. So a persona is an easy way to give context. ‘You are an expert marketing manager in India, focusing on technology ventures that work with the US’ will put it in a different headspace than if you say you're a marketer or if you don't give it any instructions at all.”

4. Assume this is the worst AI you will ever use.

“We're early, early days still. I mean, there's a lot of stuff still being built.”

Listen to Ethan Mollick’s insights on how AI can level the playing field for startups and how entrepreneurs and teams can use it to enhance creativity, efficiency, and innovation. Also, be sure to subscribe to Mollick's Substack blog/newsletter One Useful Thing, a research-based view on the implications of AI, where Mollick offers free resources and prompts.

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